AT FIRST SIGHT

He is able to tell here she’s from and engage with her just from the first few seconds and trace the
land and soundscape of New York on her shoulders. Not a good look of his face is given until the
whole opening sequence of meeting him until 6 minutes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize”, The awkward
accompanying forgiveness that Amy gives Virgi upon realizing he’s blind. Problematizing. She’s not
able to see this which can be attributed to his usual sense of gleeful and outgoing composure
knowing everyone in town. He describes her by her smell which compared to a coffeecake and
smooth voice. She tries to put a blindfold on herself and experience his way of life. He also feels that
sense to tell her about his visual impairment which is another construction of the social cues around
disability which requires one to announce his/her disability as apparent in front of everyone else.
One of the dialogues from the film being ‘see what we see’ is interesting as spoke by Virgil where he
has to specify it as a figure of speech. She also asks him how long you were blind” on the very
second of their meetings. His diagnosis appears to be from when he was on e and by two when his
sight was completely gone. She’s surprised at him pointing out the people on the street where he’s
long been familiarized to expect the myriad of things that are part of his routine. There can be a
viewing of the problematization of notions and myths surrounding the blind where they are though
of to need help at every step to take their place in the world as represented by Amy. This is not new
coming from the metaphors and literal conceptions surrounding blindness, equating it with complete
darkness. Only talking about the sight, never he vision which are often thought to be the same.

Adressal of the supernatural sense or the sixth sense which people often think mystically of when
associating with disability. For instance the expectations pervaded on them to being recognized like
writing a book like Hellen Keller or playing the piano like Ray Charkes but he has neither of those
things. RAIN. Notion of the first memory. Her acquaintes immediately replies to her seeing Virgil with
a “blind blind… white cane, tap tap, blind”. He mistakes blind as blond.

She sees an article that talks about an experimental procedure that proclaims to “restore sight to the
blind”.

Help the handicapped week. There is no problem. He spent the first eight years of his life having his
eyes probed, pierced, prodded, poked at by doctors, faith healers, spiritualists, medicine men.

The medical response being “ I mean, basically, what have you got to lose” . Presence of camera
crew. A spectacle. After holding to one kind of worldview and getting used to it, his whole world
overturns. He exclaims this can’t be seeing. While the doctor keeps pressurizing him with a “what do
you see” . Reassurance through getting something in his hands. The oi called miracle and a solution
to a problem, dosen’t really addresses the extent of change to one’s life. All of his comments like I
mean he can see. Cannot understand how terrifying the world looks in his eyes.

“Everywhere I look here, I see holes” said by his sister Jennie on looking out for him pertains to how
the world is constructed for the sighted. Mentally blind. A limbo between the two worlds. The book
his visual therapist reads talks about how a blind person has to die inside him to be born again as a
sighted person. No manual for such an experience. Feeling disoriented form all the new kinds of
information the colors, the distance’ This whole experience is just written off apart from the
magnificient miracle of being cured and becoming normal which in this case is sighted.

Reality of the world. Choosing not to see. Some people undertake blindness instead for like not
looking a the homeless person. Difficulties in the simplest of tasks. Basically living your life again from
the foundation stepes. A lot of learning and unlearning involved. Visual Memory . All the talk about
overcoming. He does not feel like he belongs there in social scenes , in parties where he is not bale to
adapt. “To be a baysitter” comparison of their relationship. From medical perspective, a seeing
person. Healed of that. More of your life.

CRITICALLY EXAMINING THE EXPERIENCE OF A FIRST SIGHT

M. von Senden published his influential study, Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape
in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation. An interpretive study of two centuries of re-
search on the congenitally blind before and after operation, Space and Sight seeks to contribute to
the theory of our ideas of space, while its purpose, the author writes, is to "throw light on the full
meaning of the task of teaching congenitally blind patients to see after operation" (14). It is an
understatement to say that methods in this task have rapidly developed since this time.
Nevertheless, von Senden's study of the state of being be- tween blindness and sightedness remains
of interest. But more importantly, von Senden's interpretations of this research emphasize the
process of psychological transformation that patients undergo as they re-orient their perceptual life
from one that has been predominately tactual to that which is now dominated by visual modes of
perception. As with Chaplin's romantic comedy, the stories contained in von Senden's work are not
only narratives of sensory restoration. They are also vivid records of the trauma associated with
changes in sensory perception. And in this way, these quite differfent cinematic and scientific
narratives are not merely and, as it happens, by chance, contemporaneous with Benjamin's writings
on historical changes in human perception.4 They also open up a way to explore the physiological
dimensions of Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, to gain a better understanding of his
theory of knowledge as an experience of simultaneous illumination and blindness.

I.

M. von Senden's seminal text on blind modes of perception, Space and Sight, is based on historical
studies of patients after operations to recover the sense of sight. Von Senden explains that after such
operations, patients are likely to experience "an initial stage of purely visual sensation," or what he
calls an experience of “first sight”. e [the newly sighted patient] does not know what he is seeing,
and everything that vision tells us concerning lines, contours, proportions, distances and motions, is
unknown to him. All his ideas were furnished by touch and hearing; those excited by the eye arrived
too late; he took no interest at all in acquiring new knowledge; he continued to behave like a blind
man. The image of blind "face feeling" is perhaps the most clich6d of images of the blind. In addition
to being demeaning, the image of blind people slowly, methodically feeling their way around the
contours of a face is misleading.

H.G. Well’s country of the blind puts forth the same idea of people beinf without sight fir so long
which leads to the idea of sight being lost. Here, a person enters the area with perfect vision but is
thought to be the handicapped one. Supports the social viosion. “Sane and quite admirable citizen”
Dichotomies persist between the ways that vision impairment is embodied and culturally
understood, and how social services including education, employment and welfare are distributed to
people marked with its diagnostic brand. Ableist notions have a unique impact on concepts of vision,
and thus on blindness, to which disability studies scholarship must respond. Attentive to these
complexities, this chapter explores the potential for disability studies to counter the ongoing
marginalisation of people living with vision impairment by interrogating ocular-centric and ocular-
normative representations of blindness.

MORAL EXPLANATION
Moral conceptualisations of disability, or what Wheatley calls the ‘religious model’ (2010: 65),
developed from pious texts such as the Bible, and as Kristiansen et al. write, it formed the ‘generally
prevalent view in antiquity’ (2009: 2). While Barnes (1997) suggests that infanticide was generally
inflicted on babies born with disabilities in ancient Greek times, the general premise of a moralist
position on disability is that the presence of impairment is evidence of them moral failings of an
individual, or his or her family. Those who acquire an impairment later in life are in receipt of
punishment for similar sins of spirituality.

SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION
A therapeutic response to what is conceived of as a biological deficiency has, since the seventeenth
century, given rise to that which has often been described as the medical, individual or personal
tragedy model of disability (Oliver 2009). The ascendancy of medical practice that has emerged from
this time positioned impairment as an objectionable condition that could and should be ameliorated.
As Kristiansen et al. write, ‘disability has been explained by scientific methods, and reduced to an
individual’s physiological or mental deficiencies’ (2009: 4). A common response to sight loss, from
this perspective, is a reduction in mental health and social connectedness, to which psychological
strategies can respond (Thurston 2010; Thurston et al. 2010). According to Scott, a psychological
explanation of vision impairment assumes a fixed set of criteria, namely ‘the psychological reactions
that all blind people have to becoming blind, and the enduring impact of the condition upon basic
components of personality’ (1969: 6). The psychological orientation suggests that if these reactions
are not managed, they can manifest in shock, grief and, apparently, enduring depression. This
behavioural approach to vision impairment thus relies heavily on concepts of adjustment: the
capacity to adapt to impaired sight and to draw on other senses to compensate for the lack will lead
to increased — or retrieved — independence.

Kristiansen et al: ‘disability is a social problem that should be dealt with through social interventions,
not an individual problem that is to be dealt with through medical interventions’ (2009: 2). This
framework, which is a cornerstone of the social model of disability, shifts the focus from the
individual to the social and cultural structures that construct disability. It argues that blindness is not
inherently disabling; rather, it is society’s failure to accommodate non-normative sensory
experiences that creates barriers. Within this framework, the problem is not the person’s inability to
see but the way society is organized around the privileging of vision. The Whitburn et al. text
introduces this idea in its discussion of “The social and learned explanation.” Here, the concept of
cultural blindness is crucial. Cultural blindness refers to a collective mode of perception in which the
visual becomes the only legitimate way of knowing and interacting with the world. It is a form of
erasure, whereby the experiences of blind individuals are rendered invisible in mainstream cultural
narratives. Instead of recognizing alternative ways of perceiving, society clings to an almost sacred
ideal of sight, equating vision with truth and objectivity. In this context, blindness is seen as an
aberration—a deviation from the norm—that must be corrected rather than accommodated.
Scholars like Mike Oliver (a seminal figure in disability studies) have long argued that disability is a
product of an environment designed for the “normate” body. According to this perspective, what is
often labeled as a deficiency is, in fact, a mismatch between a person’s abilities and a society built
around a single mode of sensory perception. This misalignment results in a systematic disabling
process: architectural barriers, communication norms, and cultural myths all conspire to “blind”
society to the realities and contributions of people who experience the world differently.

Intertwined with these theories are pervasive cultural myths that shape public understanding of
blindness. One dominant myth is that blind people possess an almost supernatural “inner vision” or
heightened sensitivity to other forms of knowledge—a narrative that simultaneously venerates and
otherizes them. This myth can be seen as a double-edged sword. On one side, it valorizes the blind
person as possessing unique, almost mystical insights; on the other, it undermines the real
challenges and systemic barriers they face daily. By romanticizing blindness in this way, society avoids
confronting the structural issues that actually disable. The metaphor of “cultural blindness” aptly
captures this dynamic: while society prides itself on its ability to “see,” it remains oblivious to its own
limitations in understanding and valuing non-visual forms of experience. Moreover, the myth of the
“inspirational disabled person” perpetuates stereotypes that can be just as limiting as they are
flattering. It frames blindness not as a complex social condition but as a personal story of overcoming
adversity—a narrative that often ignores the ongoing struggles for accessibility, rights, and
recognition. This myth, reinforced by both the medical and social discourses, serves to marginalize
the voices of those who are actually living the experience of blindness. Instead of advocating for
systemic change, the focus shifts to individual heroism, which can obscure the need for broader
cultural and infrastructural reform.

GENERAL DISCOURSE
They may be helpless and pathetic, like the young woman in the 1965 film, A Patch of Blue. On the
other hand, they may have such extraordinary powers that they drive automobiles-for example, Tom
Sullivan in IfYou Could See What [ Hear (1982) and Frank Slade, played by Al Pacino, in The Scent of a
Woman (1993). In these films, blindness is unquestioningly seen as the character's major problem. It
is blindness, rather than work, school, or the complexities of human relationships, upon which the
movie plot turns. Virgil's adjustment to vision is not an easy one. He has no visual memories. He has
no mental guidelines to help him interpret what his eyes are trying to tell him about size, shape,
motion, and distance. He is bombarded by visual images and must learn to read them little by little,
day by exhausting day. Played by actor Val Kilmer, Virgil is initially portrayed as a talented massage
therapist who also enjoys skating alone.

Blindness as dependency

The film may seek to depict Virgil, in his

blind state, as capable and well adjusted. But,

just as I feared, the portrayal has serious flaws.

Virgil knows every detail of the neighborhood

near his home. But when he and Amy walk to

the edge of his familiar terrain and she asks him

what is down the next street, he replies, "Nothing." He has no concept of a world beyond his
immediate experience. Furthermore, despite his claim to independence, his older sister is his
constant caregiver. She shops for him, cooks his meals, and helps him pick out his clothes. When
Virgil and Amy go to New York for Virgil to undergo his eye surgery, the sister deliberately passes him
into Amy's care. So long as Virgil is blind, Amy is more a caregiver than a romantic partner.
Sight as a gift or torment

In one important respect, At First Sight speaks the truth. Like Sacks's Virgil, the film's Virgil is
confused and overwhelmed by his restored vision. At some moments sight is a gift, but at others it is
a torment to him. The film shows his long struggle to learn how to see. And, like the real-life Virgil,
the film counterpart soon loses the vision he has gained. At the close of the film he is again blind, but
he has made some real strides by obtaining a dog guide and beginning to teach a group of blind
children.
Haze and Horizons: Deconstructing the